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SEC Charges Knight Capital With Violations of Market Access Rule
Washington D.C., Oct. 16, 2013 —
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Knight Capital Americas LLC has agreed to pay $12 million to settle charges that it violated the agency's market access rule in connection with the firm's Aug. 1, 2012 trading incident that disrupted the markets.
An SEC investigation found that Knight Capital did not have adequate safeguards in place to limit the risks posed by its access to the markets, and failed as a result to prevent the entry of millions of erroneous orders. Knight Capital also failed to conduct adequate reviews of the effectiveness of its controls.
This is the SEC's first enforcement action under the market access rule, which was adopted in 2010 as Rule 15c3-5.
"The market access rule is essential for protecting the markets, and Knight Capital's violations put both the firm and the markets at risk," said Andrew Ceresney, co-director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "Given the rapid pace of trading in today's markets and the potential massive impact of control breakdowns, broker-dealers must be held to the high standards of compliance necessary for the safe and orderly operation of the markets."
Daniel M. Hawke, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's Market Abuse Unit, added, "Brokers and dealers must look at each component in each of their systems and ask themselves what would happen if the component malfunctions and what safety nets are in place to limit the harm it could cause. Knight Capital's failure to ask these questions had catastrophic consequences."
According to the SEC's order, Knight Capital made two critical technology missteps that led to the trading incident on Aug. 1, 2012. Knight Capital moved a section of computer code in 2005 to an earlier point in the code sequence in an automated equity router, rendering a function of the router defective. Although this function was not meant to be used, Knight left it in the router. In late July 2012 when preparing for participation in the NYSE's new Retail Liquidity Program, Knight Capital incorrectly deployed new code in the same router. As a result, certain orders eligible for the NYSE's program triggered the defective function in Knight Capital's router, which was then unable to recognize when orders had been filled. During the first 45 minutes after the market opened on August 1, Knight Capital's router rapidly sent more than 4 million orders into the market when attempting to fill just 212 customer orders. Knight Capital traded more than 397 million shares, acquired several billion dollars in unwanted positions, and eventually suffered a loss of more than $460 million.
The SEC's order also finds that an internal Knight Capital system generated 97 automated emails that went to a group of personnel. The emails referenced the router and identified an error before the markets opened on August 1. These messages were caused by the code deployment failure, but Knight Capital did not act upon them on August 1. Although Knight Capital did not design these messages to be system alerts, they provided an opportunity to identify and fix the problem before the markets opened.
The SEC's order charges Knight Capital with violating the market access rule in the following ways:
- Did not have adequate controls at a point immediately prior to its submission of orders to the market, such as a control to compare orders leaving the router with those entered.
- Relied on financial risk controls that were not capable of preventing the entry of orders that exceeded pre-set capital thresholds for the firm in the aggregate.
- Did not link the account that received the executions on August 1 to automated controls concerning the firm's overall financial exposure.
- Did not have adequate controls and procedures for code deployment and testing for its equity order router.
- Did not have sufficient controls and written procedures to guide employees' responses to significant technological and compliance incidents.
- Did not adequately review its business activity in connection with its market access to assure the overall effectiveness of its risk management controls and supervisory procedures. Its assessment largely focused on compiling an inventory of existing controls and ensuring they functioned as intended, instead of focusing on such risks as possible malfunctions in its automated order router. The firm also reacted to prior events too narrowly and did not adequately consider the root causes of previous incidents.
- Did not have an adequate written description of its risk management controls.
- Did not certify in its 2012 annual CEO certification that Knight Capital's risk management controls and supervisory procedures complied with the market access rule.
The SEC's order also charges Knight Capital with violations of Rules 200(g) and 203(b) of Regulation SHO, which require the proper marking of short sale orders and locating of shares to borrow for short sales. The SEC's order requires Knight Capital to pay a $12 million penalty and retain an independent consultant to conduct a comprehensive review of the firm's controls and procedures to ensure compliance with the market access rule. Without admitting or denying the findings, Knight Capital consented to the SEC's order, which censures the firm and requires it to cease and desist from committing or causing these violations.
The SEC's investigation was conducted by staff in the Market Abuse Unit including Jason Burt, Carolyn Welshhans, William Max Hathaway, and Ainsley Kerr. The case was supervised by Mr. Hawke and the unit's co-deputy chief Robert Cohen. The SEC's National Exam Program and the Division of Trading and Markets provided substantial assistance.


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While that deciding to build a tiny house is exciting, I realized that I needed to get my butt in gear and accomplish a whole slew of tasks before I'm ready to buy a trailer for my tiny house on wheels build. Today I'm sharing my to do list with you, and I hope it can help you prepare for your build too – whether you're starting next week or next year.
1. Be Sure It's What You Want
This seems like a given, but there's more at work here. If you want a tiny house because you think they're cute, you might need to do a little more soul searching. If you want a tiny house because it's the logical next step in creating a more intentional way of living, well…now we're getting somewhere.
How do I know a tiny house is right for me? Well…
- I've wanted to build my own house since I was eight years old.
- I love small, cozy, confined spaces.
- I've always been passionate about good design and creating homes full of personality.
- I want to learn new things, because it improves my life and makes me a better person.
- I want to feel the pride that comes with tackling a big project.
- I care about my impact on the environment.
- It does not make sense for me to buy a traditional home because I don't know where I'll end up settling down someday.
- I'm a tiny person (5'2″) with very little stuff and few worldly needs.
Your reasons might be different. Be honest with yourself and trust your gut! You know yourself and your own motivations.
- If you are going into a tiny house build with your partner or family, agree going in that if anyone decides they're done with the tiny house life, that you'll both/all find another living solution. Not feeling trapped will work wonders when it comes to living peacefully together in a tiny house.
- If you're on the fence, there are other ways to live smaller without building a tiny house. Even just downsizing to a small house or apartment can dramatically change your outlook.
- At the end of the day, a tiny house is just an object, and objects don't change your life for the better. Only you have the power to do that.
2. Connect with Tiny House People
Even with the wealth of information available online, you'll still have questions that can only be answered by people who have gone through the building process. Also, tiny house people are just plain cool and interesting and definitely worth knowing!
I've been lucky to meet so many wonderful members of the tiny house movement through my work, but to get here, I had to seek them out myself. As an introvert, this is much easier said than done. In the beginning, I had to do a lot of hunting to find other people who were just as excited about tiny houses as I was.
- Meetup.com is a goldmine. If you're in a major metropolitan area, chances are high that there is a tiny house enthusiasts meetup nearby. If there isn't one already, why not start a group yourself?
- If there isn't a tiny house meetup group, search for related groups about minimalism, gardening and permaculture, or prepping, and you're bound to meet other people who are interested in tiny houses!
- Tiny house events are popping up all over the country, and they're a great way to meet cool folks. If you're pretty convinced you'd like to live tiny, the Tiny House Conference is a great place to make friends and ask people your questions.
- Don't just hound people on the Internet, begging them for a tour of their tiny house. Form strong give-and-take friendships with tiny house folks just like you would with anyone else.
3. Pare Down Belongings
Paring down your stuff is a huge part of living the tiny life. Last summer, I moved to Charlotte from Boston, and I took the move as an opportunity to bring only the things that could fit in the back of my Honda CRV. I got rid of two thirds of my clothing and 90% of my books – something I thought I could never do – along with decades' worth of accumulated crap from my school years. It was surprisingly easy to distinguish trash from treasure once I got in to a rhythm. Driving down the highway to my new home, with a trunk full of my most precious possessions, was a liberating feeling.
- "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." – William Morris
- For analytical minds: try the box method. Empty the contents of a drawer, closet, etc. into a big cardboard box. Each time you use an item from the box, it can return to the drawer. Whatever remains in the box after three months is something you don't need in your daily life and you can safely donate it.
- For intuitive minds: If you have more of an emotional attachment to objects like I do, I highly recommend the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. It has gone viral for a reason, and I couldn't have decluttered without it. That book is worth its own blog post, which I will write soon.
- Budget enough time for this crucial step. One tiny house family I know took a whole year to declutter.
4. Assess Needs
This is what Dee Williams from Portland Alternative Dwellings calls "playing anthropologist." A lot of what we think we need in a home is marketed to us through building trends and realtors. A tiny house is a chance to shed the excess and create a home that fits you like a glove. For this step, I wrote a big list to brainstorm all my weird quirks and how they affect my interaction with my living space.
For instance, I noticed that I never use more than two stove burners at a time, but I do use my oven very frequently (roasting vegetables is the most reliable way to trick myself into eating them). For me, an oven would be a necessity.
I find that I spend most of my leisure time lounging around in bed rather than on the couch. Aside from sleeping, I do all my reading, drawing, writing, and music-listening in bed. I'll probably forgo a lounge space in favor of a dining area, and design a luxurious sleeping loft that will double as my creative haven.
I also dye my hair monthly, so an open shower stall won't work for me unless I want to flood my whole house as I rinse out the dye. I think a stock tank bathtub would work well for me.
- Try the Post-It Note Method: Stick a Post-It Note next to each doorway in your home. Every time you leave a room, write down what it is that you're doing in each room. After a month or so, get a glimpse into how you actually use your space.
- Design for the life you have, not the one you want. This is the equivalent of keeping "skinny pants" in your wardrobe. You want to feel comfortable in your home, not guilty.
- If you have hobbies or accoutrements that require a lot of space, consider outbuildings or off-site storage, or outsourcing that hobby to a different location (e.g. an artist's studio).
- Remember: our needs are surprisingly few and easily met.
Step Four: Figure Out a Floor Plan
Right now, I have a folder on my desktop with 39 scanned, hand-drawn floor plans. To be fair, I'm a big nerd and I've been drawing these for four straight years. But whether it's digital or on paper, it's important to translate your design ideas into a visual medium.
There are lots of great ready-made tiny house floor plans on the market. We've reviewed our favorite plans to help you pick the one that's right for you – click here to check it out. But because everyone's needs are different, don't be afraid to modify an existing plan to better suit your lifestyle.
- Carry a measuring tape with you wherever you go. Measure chair heights, counter widths, the rises and runs of stair steps – it's important to know common dimensions of different elements so you can accurately plan for them.
- Measure yourself! Know how much space you need to feel comfortable. My needs as a 5'2″, 130 lb. woman will differ from the needs of a 6'3″ 275 lb. man.
- Don't forget to design space for your clothes hamper, kitchen trash can, recycling and compost bins, suitcases, bulk paper goods storage, brooms, and other cleaning implements.
- Include empty storage space in your design. Because you're alive, you'll probably still acquire new things after you move into your tiny house. Give yourself some wiggle room.
- Strive for an excellent design, not a perfect one. If you stress too much about getting things absolutely perfect, you'll never get off the ground.
5. Work with an Expert
Optional, but highly worth it. Even if you have a pretty strong grasp on what you're doing in terms of your design, it never hurts to have an expert offer their advice. At the Tiny House Conference after party, I hungrily listened to Lina Menard and Ethan Waldman as they gave me feedback on my tiny house design, which I drew on a napkin in pink pen. I'm currently collaborating with a professional plan designer and draftsman to hash out a solid layout and set of building plans, which is terribly exciting!
- Try to find experts who have experience building tiny houses. It's important for folks to have the skill of translating theoretical designs into tangible structures.
- If you can't afford a consultation, buy or borrow a copy of A Pattern Language. It's a great manual for learning the psychology of vernacular architecture (a.k.a. how to build a house you feel good in).
6. Create a Budget
Ideally, if you're ready to build within a year, you should have enough funds saved up to at least get started. If you're not careful, a tiny house can become a money pit if you don't budget and track your expenditures.
My plan is to build in stages. I'll first finish the exterior, so that the unfinished inside is safe from the elements. I can then take my time finishing the interior and saving up for some nicer appliances. Since I live in Charlotte and it's pretty warm here, I might even move in early and live in the house while I'm still working on it to pour even more money into the build. I'm planning for the build to take a long time, but I know I'll have a more rewarding learning experience that way.
In terms of saving money, it's important to have a savings account just for your tiny house so that your funds don't get mixed up and accidentally spent. I know that I'm the kind of person that will spend all my savings if they're accessible and unallocated. I use SmartyPig.com to keep my tiny house savings separate, which is free and easy to use and I can't recommend it highly enough.
- Keep your house as small and simple as possible.
- Always budget 10% – 15% more for materials.
- Anything custom will cost you a bundle – especially windows and doors.
- The exception to this rule is trailers. Instead of buying a tiny house trailer, order a custom trailer direct from a manufacturer, and hire a welder to add any extra details. You will save thousands of dollars.
- Compact appliances often cost as much or more than conventional appliances, so budget accordingly!
So what are the next steps as I move toward building my tiny house? Tune in next time for part two of this topic!
Your Turn!
- Which step will be the easiest for you?
- Which step will be more challenging?

subset: commoncrawl


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Jimmy Kimmel Previews the New iPhone's Crazy Features [VIDEO]
In anticipation of Apple's iPhone 5 announcement, Jimmy Kimmel and his trusty sidekick Guillermo previewed some of the must-have smartphone's features on last night's 'Jimmy Kimmel Live.'
We hope the iPhone 5 actually has boomerang capabilities. Check out Kimmel's take on Apple's latest gadget below.
(via Jimmy Kimmel Live)


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The U.S. Junior Outdoor Track & Field Championships head to Track Central USA for 2013. Des Moines will host some of the top junior athletes in the country, ages 16-19, with the top finishers representing the red, white and blue in Medellin, Colombia August 23 – August 25. This year's Team USA squad will look to best the 72 medals won by Team USA at the 2011 Pan Am Junior Athletics Championships in Miramar, Florida.
Hosted by Greater Des Moines and Drake University, Iowa looks to continue long and storied legacy as a track and field destination. Drake Stadium has once before played host to the USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in 2010, three times the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 2008, 2011, and 2012, and 104 editions of the Drake Relays.


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The US presidential election result leaves President Barack Obama in the White House and maintains the balance of power in Congress. In many longstanding technology debates, policy experts see little movement forward, although lawmakers may look for compromises on a handful of issues.
US voters again elected a divided Congress with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives and Democrats the majority in the Senate. Obama and some members of Congress may push for immigration reform, including an expansion of high-skill immigration programs, and expect some lawmakers to push for online copyright enforcement provisions, although likely to be different than the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) that failed to pass earlier this year.
But tech-savvy voters should expect a whole lot of nothing on several other issues. "If people vote for the status quo they shouldn't be surprised if they get it," Thomas Lenard, president of free-market think tank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI), said in an email. "Only thing that has changed is that Obama doesn't have to run for re-election. Whether that means he'll move toward the center, I don't know."
Here are some tech-related issues to watch out for in coming months:
Immigration: Several large tech companies, including Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, have called for an expansion of the H-1B high-skill visa program and a loosening of restrictions on L-1 visas, used for intra-company transfers of employees from foreign offices to the U.S. Microsoft, in September, advocated new US$10,000 H-1B visas, with additional funds used for new education programs.
Immigration reform, addressing both high-skill and illegal immigration, may be an area where the Obama administration and Congress can find compromise, some tech policy experts said. Immigration reform should be among Obama's top policy priorities in 2013, said Kevin Richards, senior vice president for federal government affairs at TechAmerica, a trade group.
After the budget deficit, "I think that immigration reform is the new big-ticket issue for the president," Richards said.
Still, lawmakers have been reluctant to deal with high-skill immigration separate from illegal immigration, and illegal immigration remains a difficult, hot-button issue in Congress. While Congress may move forward on high-skill immigration, the "status quo in the White House could worsen prospects, Arlene Holen, a senior fellow at TPI, said in an email. "Despite claiming the importance of high-skilled immigration, they have been making it much harder administratively to get visas."
Copyright enforcement: Huge online protests in late 2011 and early this year sunk SOPA and PIPA, but expect the Motion Picture Association of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other backers of stronger copyright enforcement to push for revamped legislation in 2013.
Those groups will likely advocate for lite versions of SOPA or PIPA in an effort to paint opponents of the bills as out of the mainstream, predicted Gigi Sohn, president of digital rights group Public Knowledge and a vocal opponent of SOPA and PIPA. But after millions of Internet users spoke out against SOPA and PIPA, there will also be a "push on the other side" to roll back some past copyright protections that critics see as excessive, she said.
The U.S. could also see a "huge consumer outcry" if a U.S. Copyright ruling against ripping one's own DVD stands and if the Supreme Court rules that consumers cannot resell copyright-protected products produced overseas, Sohn said.
"We now are going to have a national conversation about what's the right level of [intellectual property] enforcement, regardless of who proposes what," Sohn said. "I think there's actually going to be a serious conversation."
Look for the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama to continue to shut down websites accused of trafficking in counterfeit or pirated products. The two agencies have seized more than 1,500 websites for alleged copyright infringement and counterfeiting during the past two years.
Cybersecurity: Congress debated several cybersecurity bills in its 2011-12 session, but failed to pass legislation. Many of the bills focused on allowing U.S. agencies and private companies to share cyberthreat information with each other, although digital rights and civil liberties groups raised privacy concerns. Several observers, including TechAmerica's Richards and the Center for Democracy and Technology senior counsel Greg Nojeim, expect Obama to issue an executive order on cybersecurity early next year, if Congress does not act in an upcoming lame-duck session.
Even if Obama issues an executive order, there will be a push in Congress to pass legislation to deal with issues such as cybersecurity research and development funding and cybersecurity regulations for federal agencies, Richards said.
But with little change in the makeup of Congress, "it's tough to see the path forward" on a comprehensive cybersecurity bill, Nojeim said.
Net neutrality: With control of Congress split between the Democrats in the Senate and the Republicans in the House, it will be difficult for Republicans to overturn the net neutrality rules the U.S. Federal Communications Commission passed in late 2010. Verizon Communications has filed a lawsuit challenging the rules, and a decision is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
So the split Congress cuts both ways. If the D.C. Circuit overturns the net neutrality rules, as many observers predict, it will be difficult for Congress to reinstate them. With Obama's re-election, the Democratic majority at the FCC will remain, but Sohn questioned whether the FCC has the courage to stand up to large carriers, congressional Republicans and the court.
Privacy: Expect some lawmakers to push for legislation that would require mobile carriers and app makers to disclose whether they are tracking users or get permission to do so. Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, and Representative Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, both introduced mobile privacy legislation during the past two years, but neither bill passed.
Obama has also called for Congress to pass a privacy bill of rights, although there's been no progress so far. Some Republicans have raised concerns about online privacy, however, so there may be room for Congress to move forward next year.
With or without legislation, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will continue to work with privacy groups and companies to develop privacy codes of conduct. The NTIA has focused its efforts so far on mobile privacy, where there seems to be the most concern.
Government surveillance of electronic communications: In a related topic, a coalition of digital rights groups and tech companies will continue to push for changes to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which now allows law enforcement agencies to gain access to unopened emails and files stored in the cloud for longer than 180 days through a subpoena, typically issued by a prosecutor, instead of a judge-issued warrant. Under ECPA, data stored in the cloud has weaker protections than data stored on a suspect's computer.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has a markup hearing on ECPA reform this month, noted CDT's Nojeim. "This is very, very important for cloud providers," he said.
Spectrum: The FCC is moving forward on efforts to auction wireless spectrum given up by television stations. There's bipartisan support for auctioning more spectrum in an effort to lessen the impact of a predicted spectrum shortage. Look for other spectrum arguments, however, with some Republicans questioning how much new spectrum should go toward unlicensed uses like super Wi-Fi.
There's also a looming debate at the FCC over whether spectrum holding limits for large mobile carriers should be changed. Small carriers and digital rights groups are pushing for spectrum caps.
Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is email@example.com.


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Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more.
Often times we are unable to locate the violation and if unable to contact the complainant (chosen to remain anonymous) we will decline the complaint as unable to identify a violation.
Show All Answers
1. A Complaint may be filed by going to the City's Website www.texas-city-tx.org . Select the "How do I…" tab and then select Submit: Report a Code Violation. You will be taken directly to the electronic form.
2. Next choose a Category: "Buildings Complaints – "Working without permits" or "Code Enforcement". This selection will route the complaint to the proper department.
3. Next choose a Subcategory:
• Working without a Permit
• Junk & Debris
• Non-Complaint Junk & Debris
• High Grass & Weeds
• Junk/Abandoned Vehicle(s)
• Substandard Structure(s)
• Miscellaneous Complaint(s)
This selection will route the complaint to an assigned investigator.
4. Next enter the location of complaint using the "Add a location to your request" mapping. It is easier if you use the "Locate by Map" feature and Toggle to full screen and enlarge the map to locate the exact location of the complaint.
• Please note that without an address, we cannot perform a site visit and may Decline the complaint.
• The "Locate by Address" will only work if the location has previously been entered into the system, such as by requesting a permit or recently constructed. Older homes may not be in the system.
5. Next enter a Description of the complaint. This assists the investigator in ensuring your complaint is located and properly evaluated. Attaching an image is great if you can do that!
6. Next enter your Contact Information.
• If you choose to Remain Anonymous you will not receive any notifications of progress or resolution.
• If you enter your Name, Email and Phone number you will receive email notifications of progress or resolution in real-time as the complaint progresses.
7. Next answer the Security Code question and Submit the Request.
The easiest way is to email email@example.com. We have established an email group and by emailing to this address group someone will be able to answer your question or get you the information you are requesting.
We have established Complaint Status Categories. As each complaint works through the Code Complaint Report Module, it is assigned a Status for tracking purposes:
• Pending – Each complaint received is automatically assigned Pending status. This status indicates that an investigator has not yet reviewed the complaint.
• Accepted – Complaint has been accepted for investigation and review by a Neighborhood Improvement Services Official.
• In Progress – The complaint is being actively worked as a Neighborhood Improvement Services Project.
• Completed – Case is closed with satisfactory result. This may be either by voluntary compliance or forced compliance.
• Canceled – A complaint may be canceled because we have received the same complaint from another citizen.
• Declined – Upon investigation, an investigator was unable to identify a code violation.
• Occasionally, an investigator may provide an update during the In Progress status as available.
We hate to say it depends on the type of complaint, but that is the correct answer. A High Grass complaint or a junk vehicle complaint may take from three (3) to four (4) weeks. However, if the owner contests the Notice of Violation and requests a Court Hearing, the timeline may be significantly extended.
Even if the owner does not request a Court hearing, a junk vehicle on private property requires an Abatement Order signed by a Judge before the junk vehicle may be removed.
I thought the owner only has ten (10) days to comply?
That's correct. However, if the owner does not voluntary comply an Abatement Order is required to force compliance on private property with all complaints except high grass. This extends the ten (10) days significantly.
For example: In the event of a high grass complaint that does not require an Abatement Order, after the ten (10) days, the property is placed on the abatement list for notification to the contractor, the contractor is notified [weekly or bi-weekly], and then, weather permitting, mows the property.
If the complaint involves a substandard structure and is contested by the owner the court proceedings alone may take from two (2) to three (3) years to obtain a resolution before demolition may begin.
A vehicle that is self-propelled or a non-motored vehicle including but not limited to trailers and:
(a) Does not have lawfully attached to it:
1. An unexpired license plate; or
2. Does not display a license plate, or
3. A valid motor vehicle inspection certificate, or
(b) Is:
1. Wrecked, dismantled or partially dismantled, or discarded; or
2. Inoperable and has remained inoperable for more than:
a. Seventy-two consecutive hours, if the vehicle is on public property; or
b. Thirty consecutive days, if the vehicle is on private property, or
(c) An aircraft that does not has lawfully printed on the aircraft an unexpired federal aircraft identification number registered under FAA aircraft registration regulations, or
(d) A watercraft that:
1. Does not have lawfully on board an unexpired certificate of number, and
2.Is not a watercraft described by Section 31.055, Parks and Wildlife Code.
Grass or weeds that uniformly exceed twelve (12) inches in height
Yes, it is. However, by remaining anonymous you will not be able to track the complaint or receive updates.
You can go to Texas City Fire Department Administration, 1725 25th Street, and complete a paper form, or request a form at City Hall, or go to the Library and a librarian will assist you with computer filing.
Very much so; as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Generally, all pools in Texas must be in an enclosed fenced area at least 4 feet tall with no gaps of greater than 4 inches including between the ground and bottom of the fence.
This is a repeat or recurring violation. If the new violation is within the twelve month time period from when the City obtained an Abatement Order, the new violation(s) can be corrected using the original Abatement Order. If the new violation is over twelve (12) months from the Abatement Order, a new Abatement Order must be obtained to correct the violation.


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Producers of processed lithium - an essential element for batteries used in electric cars - are agreeing long-term contracts with their customers to fund the investments needed to address a looming shortfall.
Demand for battery-grade lithium compounds is expected to skyrocket in the next decades in tandem with soaring demand for electric cars as governments and individual consumers try to reduce their carbon footprint.
Related: The Great Battery Battle: Tesla Sparks an Arms Race in Energy Storage
Although there's plenty of lithium around, the problem is ensuring there is enough capacity to process it.
Battery makers and other end-users such as car manufacturers will need to sign multi-year deals that encourage large producers to invest more, and faster, industry sources say.
Some of that is already happening.
"We've established the timeline for our own expansion based on the commitments our customers are making with us," said Tom Schneberger, global business director at U.S.-listed FMC Lithium (FMC.N), one of the world's top four producers.
"Our first priority will be to provide the adequate supply of the high quality products upon which (our strategic customers) rely," he told Reuters.
Expansion plans by Chile's Sociedad Quimica Y Minera (SQM) SQMa.SN, another of the top four, for next year are also based on long-term agreements, the company told Reuters.
The production and use of electric cars is projected by Morgan Stanley analysts to rise to 2.9 percent of 99 million new vehicles in 2020 and to 9.4 percent of 102 million new vehicles in 2025, from 1.1 percent of 86.5 million this year.
By 2050, 81 percent of 132 million new auto sales will be electric, Morgan Stanley says.
Related: 5 Reasons Electric Cars Won't Reduce Oil Consumption Anytime Soon
The lithium-ion batteries needed to power electric cars use lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide, but the industry typically talks in terms of lithium carbonate equivalent which contains both.
Two types of lithium deposits dominate.
One is hard rock as found in Australia, for which ready-to- go capacity to produce battery grade lithium can take up to three years. The other is brine, mostly found in Chile and Argentina, which can take seven years or more.
China has reserves of both.
Consultants Roskill estimate 785,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent a year will be needed by 2025, amounting to a 26,000-tonne shortfall from anticipated supply, compared to 217,000 tonnes of demand versus 227,000 tonnes of supply this year.
Others expect an even larger deficit.
"There's limited visibility into where we're going to get the last 200,000 tonnes of lithium if we hit the numbers Roskill is expecting for 2025," said Seth Ginns, a managing director at Jennison Associates.
Jennison manages more than $164 billion of investment and is a top 10 investor in both FMC and U.S.-listed Albemarle (ALB.N), another of the top four producers.
"We estimate the lithium industry is going to need between $4-$5 billion of investment out to 2025," said Simon Moores, managing director at Benchmark Minerals Intelligence.
Price projections out to 2025 are not available, but Benchmark estimates prices of lithium carbonate will average $13,000 a ton over the 2017-2020 period from around $9,000 a ton in 2015-2016.
Related: How Enormous Batteries Could Help Save Billions in Energy Costs
Demand for lithium hydroxide, preferred over carbonate as it allows greater battery capacity and longer life, is expected to grow at a faster pace. Benchmark predicts the price to average $18,000 a ton between 2017-2020 against $14,000 in 2015-2016.
Top producers are looking at a bonanza if they can ramp up investment fast enough with end-user commitments in hand.
"There are four names that dominate and that is likely to be the case for the next five years," said Jeremy Kent, a portfolio manager at Allianz Global Investors.
Roskill managing director Robert Baylis estimates FMC, Albemarle, SQM and China's Tianqi Lithium Corporation (002466.SZ) together accounted for 66 percent of the world's lithium carbonate equivalent last year. Wood Mackenzie consultant James Whiteside puts the figure at 78 percent.
FMC's lithium hydroxide capacity rose 80 percent in 2017 to 18,000 tonnes a year, and it has plans to boost that to 30,000 tonnes by the end of 2019. After that, capacity will be expanded as required by demand, FMC's Schneberger said.
Albemarle is planning to expand its lithium carbonate equivalent capacity to 165,000 tonnes by 2021 from 89,000 tonnes this year, a spokesperson said. "We anticipate spending $700 million and $1 billion over the next 5 years."
SQM said in an email it was planning to invest $50 million to expand its lithium carbonate capacity in Chile to 63,000 tonnes by 2018 from 48,000 tonnes currently. It also has joint ventures in Argentina and Australia to develop deposits.
Tianqi Lithium declined to comment on its investment plans.
Another company actively investing is Australia's Orocobre, which planned to produce 17,500 tonnes a year of lithium carbonate at its Olaroz facility in Argentina.
Severe weather cut this year's production to 11,700-11,800 tonnes, however.
Whiteside said Orocobre's difficulties were typical of many smaller players, noting that the Olaroz facility was the first new major brine operation started in 20 years.
"Because the number of brine operations has been so few historically, there are very few technically experienced chemical engineers to assist these junior companies," he said.
"There are people out there promoting brine projects with plans that are not as robust as they should be."


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Wirecast Gear 230
The only system with 4 assignable SDI I/O Ports for Maximum Flexibility!
An Advanced live streaming production system.
- Wirecast Pro software
- 4 assignable HD-SDI I/O Ports
- 2TB storage (~40 hrs of HD video)
- NewBlue Titler Live Complete
Wirecast Gear is an extremely portable computer workstation designed to run Wirecast Pro, for live event production and streaming. With four assignable SDI I/O professional camera inputs and all the live streaming production features of Wirecast Pro, in a compact, powerful hardware system, Wirecast Gear is a unique blend of performance, ease of use and affordability.
Fully configured, end-to-end, live streaming production system that is affordable and easy to use
Versatile, convenient design
The versatile Wirecast Gear workstation is based on a short-depth rackmount for convenient mounting in a travel case or in-place installation. It also comes with a set of rubber feet for tabletop operation with a sleek, ergonomic design built to easily fit into your production environment. The unit has no platter-based hard drives, making it ideal for transport. Choose from SDI or HDMI models.
Fully configured, ready-to-use system
Don't worry about building your own Live video streaming system – we built one for you. Wirecast Gear comes with everything you need to start streaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or any destination on the web in minutes. Plug in up to 4 cameras in the SDI inputs, and you're ready to go. Comes with seven USB 3.0 ports, three display ports, and fully loaded with Wirecast Pro and NewBlue live titling software, plus Switch – our advanced media player.
Powerful live production
Wirecast Gear pre-loaded with Wirecast Pro, Telestream's award-winning live video streaming production software. Wirecast lets you switch between multiple live cameras while dynamically mixing in other media such as remote live guests, screen captures, movies, images, and audio tracks. It's powerful production capabilities include features such as fully-feature audio mixing, dynamic transitions, instant replay, playlists, built-in titles, chroma key, virtual sets, live scoreboards, clocks, timers, and more.
Hardware-accelerated encoding
When you're ready to stream, Wirecast's built-in encoding engine allows you to stream high-quality H.264 video and AAC audio over RTMP, RTP and Windows Media protocols for maximum flexibility. Stream to multiple destinations simultaneously and record. Using the hardware-accelerated Quick Sync encoding, you can easily stream or record high-quality video while using fewer resources.
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Wirecast GearCare is a powerful upgrade that extends Warranty and Support on a Wirecast Gear system to three years. Included is full Wirecast Premium support for direct access to Telestream technicians, Next Day Air advanced replacement if your system fails and access to the latest versions of our software.
- Wirecast Gear 230 ($ 7,995.00)
- XKeys ( $ 599.95)
- 1 PTZ Optics 12x NDI Camera ($ 1,999.00)
- 1 PTZ Optics 20x NDI Camera ($ 2,099.00)
- 1 NewTek Connect Spark HDMI ($ 495.00)
- Rubix 22 USB Audio Interface ($149.99)


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Assurance Cases and Confidence
From the braking system in your automobile to the software that controls the aircraft that you fly in, safety-critical systems are ubiquitous. Showing that such systems meet their safety requirements has become a critical area of work for software and systems engineers. "We live in a world in which our safety depends on software-intensive systems," editors of IEEE Software wrote in the magazine's May/June issue. "Organizations everywhere are struggling to find cost-effective methods to deal with the enormous increase in size and complexity of these systems, while simultaneously respecting the need to ensure their safety." The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is addressing this issue with a significant research program into assurance cases. Our sponsors are regularly faced with assuring that complex software-based systems meet certain kinds of requirements such as safety, security, and reliability. In this post, the first in a series on assurance cases and confidence, I will introduce the concept of assurance cases and show how they can be used to argue that a safety requirement (or other requirement such as security) has been met.
Making a Sound Evaluation
A system is deemed "safety-critical" when its failure could result in loss of life or catastrophic damage. Such systems are expensive to develop, build, and deploy. Due to the severe consequences of failure, most safety-critical systems are also subject to evaluation by some external authority (such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for medical devices in the United States or the Ministry of Defence for flight control systems in the United Kingdom). To enable the evaluator to make a sound evaluation, developers must provide information about the system and its development, including requirements, documentation of design decisions, hazard analyses, development process, and verification and validation results. Developers submit this information (which constitutes an "argument") that they believe will convince evaluators to approve the system.
Industry has long relied on process-based arguments to help evaluators conduct their evaluations, but as the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science reported in 2007:
For a system to be regarded as dependable, concrete evidence must be present that substantiates the dependability claim. This evidence will take the form of a dependability case arguing that the required properties follow from the combination of the properties of the system itself (that is, the implementation) and the environmental assumptions. ... In addition, the case will inevitably involve appeals to the process by which the software was developed.
Although called a "dependability case" in the NRC report, most researchers, evaluators, and users have since coalesced around the term "assurance case." When developing an assurance case for safety, the case is usually called a "safety case." As defined by the U.K. Ministry of Defence:
A safety case is a structured argument, supported by a body of evidence that provides a compelling, comprehensible and valid case that a system is safe for a given application in a given environment.
An assurance case is somewhat similar in form to a legal case. In a legal case, there are two basic elements:
- evidence, including witnesses, fingerprints, DNA, etc.
- an argument given by the attorneys as to why the jury should believe that the evidence supports (or does not support) the claim that the defendant is guilty (or not guilty)
If an attorney argues that a defendant is guilty, but provides no evidence to support that argument, the jury would certainly have reasonable doubts about the guilt of the defendant. Conversely, if an attorney presents evidence, but no supporting argument explaining its relevance, the jury would have difficulty deciding how the evidence relates to the defendant.
The goal-structured assurance case is similar. There is evidence (such as test results) that a property of interest (such as safety) holds. Without an argument as to why the test results support the claim of safety, however, an interested party could have difficulty understanding its relevance or sufficiency. With only a detailed argument of system safety but no test results, it would again be hard to establish the system's safety.
A goal-structured assurance case therefore specifies a claim regarding a property of interest, evidence that supports that claim, and a detailed argument explaining how the evidence supports the claim. An assurance case differs from a legal case in one significant respect. In a legal case there are advocates for both sides (the defendant is guilty; the defendant is not guilty). Typically, an assurance case is only used to show one point of view--the system is safe (and not the system is unsafe.)
Figure 1 above shows a notional safety case in Goal Structuring Notation (GSN). The case argues that the system is safe because both of hazards A and B have been eliminated. The elimination of those hazards is supported by evidence Ev1, Ev2, and Ev3. The evidence might be test results, analysis, modeling, simulation, etc.
Support for the use of assurance cases in the United States is nascent but increasing:
- The FDA has taken steps towards requiring their use when a device manufacturer submits a medical device for approval.
- NASA suggested the use of assurance cases as a part of development of the Constellation system.
- The Aerospace Corporation used assurance cases to help with a GPS satellite ground station replenishment program.
In Europe and the United Kingdom, the use of assurance cases is more common. They are required in systems as diverse as flight control systems, nuclear reactor shutdown systems, and railroad signaling systems.
Whether required or not, creating an assurance case is not just a pro forma exercise. Assurance cases provide many benefits. For instance, the act of creating an assurance case helps stakeholders establish a shared understanding of issues that contribute to safety. Once complete, an assurance case provides a reviewable artifact documenting how safety is achieved in the system. The assurance case is also useful as an artifact that a reviewer or regulator can use to understand and make judgments about the system.
The SEI has an active research program in assurance cases, and in particular how to know that an assurance case adequately justifies its claim about the subject system, which is actually a classic philosophical problem:
determining the basis for belief in a hypothesis when it is impossible to examine every possible circumstance covered by the hypothesis
Our exploration has led us to examine theories from philosophy, law, rhetoric, mathematics, and artificial intelligence--as well as the vibrant assurance case community--as sources of relevant material to develop a theory of argumentation. The theory we are developing uses Baconian probability and eliminative induction to help eliminate sources of reduced confidence in a claim.
Subsequent posts in this series will discuss our research into what we are calling argumentation theory. The theory will help make it easier to construct, modify, and evaluate assurance cases that are believable and will also make it possible to determine how much justified confidence one should have in it. In the next post we will begin to discuss these subjects. In the meantime we welcome your comments on the topic of assurance cases below.
Additional Resources
To read the SEI technical report Toward a Theory of Assurance Case Confidence, please visit https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetid=28067
To read the SEI technical note Towards an Assurance Case Practice for Medical Devices, please visit
To read the report Software for Dependable Systems: Sufficient Evidence? please visit http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11923.html
To read the dissertation Arguing Safety--A Systematic Approach to Safety Case Management by Timothy Patrick Kelly, please visit
To read the report Ministry of Defence, Defence Standard--0056: Safety Management Requirements for Defence Systems--Part 2, please visit
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The country's biggest and grandest musical event of the year kicks off this Saturday (June 23) as ABS-CBN premieres the much-awaited Philippine adaptation of the worldwide phenomenal hit 'X Factor' franchise, "The X Factor Philippines," with KC Concepcion as host and Martin Nievera, Gary Valenciano, Charice Pempengco, and Pilita Corrales as celebrity judge-mentors.
"The X Factor Philippines" is searching for undiscovered talent 16 years old andabove that will be divided into four categories: Girls, Boys, Adults and Groups. They should be willing to brave the panel for a chance to win the biggest prize in a Philippine singing competition, a whopping P4 million worth of prizes, and become the next Pinoy multimedia star.
After months of auditions in 70 cities across the country, more than 20,000 hopefuls flocked to the audition venues in hopes of fulfilling their dreams. But it wasn't an easy ride for each and every one of them as they underwent a tedious screening process.
As early as the audition stage, the hopefuls must instantly impress the judges and at the same time an audience of thousands that can be a potential legion of fans. The auditionees need at least three yes's from the judge-mentors to be able to proceed to the next stage— the Boot Camp.
In the Boot Camp, selected contestants will go through a series of performances that will further test their 'x factor.' This will enable the judge-mentors to select and trim them down to 20 contestants divided in four categories— five solo male contestants aged 16-25 or the "Boys," five solo female contestants aged 16-25 or "Girls," five solo contestants over 25 years old or the "Adults," and five group contestants aged 16 and above or the "Groups."
Before advancing to the Judges' Homes stage, "The X Factor Philippines" producers will then reveal which category judge-mentors Martin, Gary, Charice, and Pilita will be mentoring. The judge-mentors then take the contestants to their respective "Judge's Home" where they will select the best performers to take to the live show.
Only three contestants from each category will complete the final 12 contestants who will proceed in the last and final stage of the competition. At this point, the finalists must face the fifth and final judge who has the sole power to turn their dream of becoming a star into reality— the viewers.
Who will become the first grand winner of "The X Factor Philippines" and win about P4 million in prizes? Will the winner come from the Boys, Girls, Adults, or Groups? Who among the mentors will coach the country's next singing superstar?
Watch out for jaw-dropping performances from auditionees and unexpected tensions among the celebrity judge-mentors. More surprises are also coming your way in weeks to come.
First introduced in the UK, "The X Factor" has conquered more than 30 countries as of mid-2011 and produced more than 50 winners around the world. Its UK format gave birth to multi-platinum album selling artists Leona Lewis, Alexandra Burke and the newest group hitting the charts, One Direction. To date, it is considered to be UK's biggest talent search.
Meanwhile, in the US, the second season of "The X Factor USA" will soon hit TV screen with Britney Spears and Demi Lovato joining the judges table. Together with Simon Cowell and L.A. Reid, they are about to search the successor to first "The X Factor USA" grand winner, Melanie Amaro.
Don't miss the much-awaited premiere of the country's biggest and grandest musical event of the year, "The X Factor Philippines," this Saturday (June 23) after "MMK," on ABS-CBN. The show also airs on Sundays after "Sarah G Live."


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Researchers at Columbia Engineering, led by Computer Science Professor Peter Belhumeur, have taken bird-watching to a new level. Using computer vision and machine learning techniques, they have developed Birdsnap, a new iPhone app that is an electronic field guide featuring 500 of the most common North American bird species. The free app, which enables users to identify bird species through uploaded photos, accompanies a visually beautiful, comprehensive website that includes some 50,000 images. Birdsnap, which also features birdcalls for each species, offers users numerous ways to organize species -- alphabetically, by their relationship in the Tree of Life, and by the frequency with which they are sighted at a particular place and season. The researchers, who collaborated with colleagues at the University of Maryland, are presenting their work at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Columbus, OH, June 24 to 27.
"Our goal is to use computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a digital field guide that will help people learn to recognize birds," says Belhumeur, who launched Leafsnap, a similar electronic field guide for trees, with colleagues two years ago. "We've been able to take an incredible collection of data -- thousands of photos of birds -- and use technology to organize the data in a useful and fun way."
Belhumeur and his colleague, Computer Science Professor David Jacobs of the University of Maryland, realized that many of the techniques they have developed for face recognition, in work spanning more than a decade, could also be applied to automatic species identification. State-of-the-art face recognition algorithms rely on methods that find correspondences between comparable parts of different faces, so that, for example, a nose is compared to a nose, and an eye to an eye. Birdsnap works the same way, detecting the parts of a bird so that it can examine the visual similarity of its comparable parts (each species is labeled through the location of 17 parts). It automatically discovers visually similar species and makes visual suggestions for how they can be distinguished.
"Categorization is one of the fundamental problems of computer vision," says Thomas Berg, a Columbia Engineering computer science PhD candidate who works closely with Belhumeur. "Recently, there's been a lot of progress in fine-grained visual categorization, the recognition of -- and distinguishing between -- categories that look very similar. What's really exciting about Birdsnap is that not only does it do well at identifying species, but it can also identify which parts of the bird the algorithm uses to identify each species. Birdsnap then automatically annotates images of the bird to show these distinctive parts -- birders call them 'field marks' -- so the user can learn what to look for."
The team designed what they call "part-based one-vs-one features," or POOFs, each of which classifies birds of just two species, based on a small part of the body of the bird. The system builds hundreds of POOFs for each pair of species, each based on a different part of the bird, and chooses the parts used by the most accurate POOFs as field marks. Birdsnap also uses POOFs for identification of uploaded images.
The team also took advantage of the fact that modern cameras, especially those on phones, embed the date and location in their images and used that information to improve classification accuracy. Not only did they come up with a fully automatic method to teach users how to identify visually similar species, but they also designed a system that can pinpoint which birds are arriving, departing, or migrating. "You can ID birds in the U.S. wherever you are at any time of year," Berg notes.
The Leafsnap app, which involved costly time and resources spent in collecting and photographing thousands of leaves, took almost 10 years to develop and now has more than a million users. Belhumeur got Birdsnap going in about six months, thanks to the proliferation of online data sources and advances in computer vision and mobile computing. Photos were downloaded from the Internet, with species labels confirmed by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, who also labeled the parts. Descriptions were sourced through Wikipedia. The maps were based on data from eBird, a joint venture of Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, and BirdLife, an international network of conservation groups.
Belhumeur hopes next to work with Columbia Engineering colleagues on adding the ability to recognize bird songs, bringing audio and visual recognition together. He also wants to create "smart" binoculars that use this artificial intelligence technology to identify and tag species within the field of view.
"Biological domains -- whether trees, dogs, or birds -- where taxonomy dictates a clear set of subcategories, are wonderfully well-suited to the problem of fine-grained visual categorization," Belhumeur observes. "With all the advances in computer vision and information collection, it's an exciting time to be immersed in visual recognition and big data."
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.
App: https://itunes.apple.com/app/birdsnap/id880461148
Website: http://birdsnap.com/
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Want to Do Business in Cuba? All Roads Lead to Raúl Castro's Son-in-Law
Things are changing rapidly in Cuba, and people from around the world
are eager to get in on the action. Wait until they meet their new partner.
September 30, 2015 Michael Smith
Propaganda outside Mariel, a new base for private investment. The sign
reads, "By order of the commander in chief, we fulfill our promise at
Baragua." It refers to a 19th-century Cuban rebellion against colonial
Omar Everleny Pérez is eager to show me how far Raúl Castro's overhaul
of Cuba's socialist economy has advanced, and so, on a muggy evening in
August, the 54-year-old economist invites me into his home in Havana's
Marianao neighborhood. Above his cramped desk, shelves sag under the
weight of economics books and monographs, including more than a dozen
that Pérez wrote.
"Just look at this," he says, pointing to the screen of his wheezy black
desktop PC. He clicks on a file, and scenes of Havana's colonial-era
port appear. A female narrator with a soothing voice describes a 14-part
government plan to replace the gritty piers with cruise ship terminals,
restaurants, and hotels, all to be bankrolled by foreign investors.
Run-down warehouses fade digitally into luxury apartments, shops and
offices, and marinas crowded with yachts. Little virtual people jog and
bike along greenways where an oil refinery now sits, and a ferry glides
into a modern glass-and-steel terminal.
"It's really visionary, what they want to do, if you think about it,"
says Pérez, a professor at the University of Havana and a researcher at
the influential Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy.
Later, a few steps from the port in Old Havana, I see the city's
redevelopment in progress. Near El Floridita, where Ernest Hemingway
once knocked back daiquiris, the hulking Manzana de Gómez building is
being transformed into a five-star hotel. Stylish boutiques sell perfume
and stereos. Inside an old warehouse is a microbrewery teeming with
people drinking lager made in huge steel tanks imported from Austria.
What isn't immediately apparent to a person taking a walk on a warm
Caribbean night is that all of this—and anything else that stands to
make money in Old Havana, and much of the rest of the country—is run by
a man who is little known outside the opaque circles of Cuba's
authoritarian regime. A quiet general in the Revolutionary Armed Forces,
Cuba's multibranch military, he has spent his life around the communist
elite that served Fidel Castro's revolution. Yet he is chairman of the
largest business empire in Cuba, a conglomerate that comprises at least
57 companies owned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces and operated under
a rigid set of financial benchmarks developed over decades. It's a
decidedly capitalist element deeply embedded within socialist Cuba.
This is Luis Alberto Rodriguez. For the better part of three decades,
Rodriguez has worked directly for Raúl Castro. He's the gatekeeper for
most foreign investors, requiring them to do business with his
organization if they wish to set up shop on the island. If and when the
U.S. finally removes its half-century embargo on Cuba, it will be this
man who decides which investors get the best deals.
It's a decidedly capitalist element deeply embedded within
authoritarian, socialist Cuba.
Rodriguez doesn't just count Castro as a longtime boss. He's family.
More than 20 years ago, Rodriguez, a stocky, square-jawed son of a
general, married Deborah Castro, Raúl's daughter. In the past five
years, Castro has vastly increased the size of Rodriguez's business
empire, making him one of the most powerful men in Cuba. Rodriguez's
life is veiled in secrecy. He's rarely been photographed or quoted in
the media, and his age isn't publicly known. (He's thought to be 55.)
Rodriguez and the other Cuban government officials in this story
declined multiple requests for comment.
In a country where capitalism was treated as a subversive enemy force
for a half-century, Raúl Castro has been cautiously opening the island
to private enterprise since he effectively succeeded Fidel as president
of the country in 2006. Daily life has changed for many people. There
are now 201 permitted types of private businesses (restaurants and
bed-and-breakfasts are the biggest categories), employing a million
people, or a fifth of the Cuban workforce, according to Pérez and other
Raúl Castro has legalized the sale of homes and cars, scrapped travel
restrictions, and allowed private farming and cooperative businesses.
It's now legal for Cubans to stay in hotels, and 2.6 million people own
cell phones, up from close to zero a decade ago.
But Castro has kept the big-money industries in the hands of the state,
and much of it is managed by his son-in-law. (Or former son-in-law;
there are rumors, difficult to confirm, that Rodriguez and Deborah
Castro have divorced.) Rodriguez's Grupo de Administración Empresarial
runs companies that account for about half the business revenue produced
in Cuba, says Peréz. Other economists say it may be closer to 80 percent.
GAESA, as it's called (it's pronounced guy-A-suh), owns almost all of
the retail chains in Cuba and 57 of the mainly foreign-run hotels from
Havana to the country's finest Caribbean beaches. GAESA has restaurant
and gasoline station chains, rental car fleets, and companies that
import everything from cooking oil to telephone equipment. Rodriguez is
also in charge of Cuba's most important base for global trade and
foreign investment: a new container ship terminal and
465-square-kilometer (180-square-mile) foreign trade zone in Mariel.
Cubans talk constantly about the changes they've seen. But for a
majority of people, Castro's reforms haven't delivered that most basic
thing: a living wage. Salaries average just 584 pesos, or about $24, a
month, government figures show. That's what it costs to buy 2 kilos (4.4
pounds) of chicken breasts, a couple bags of rice and beans, and four
rolls of toilet paper in one of GAESA's Panamericana supermarkets. Costs
are sky-high for most people because they earn Cuban pesos but
everything they have to buy is priced in a parallel, dollar-linked
currency called Cuban convertible pesos, or CUCs.
On a breezy Saturday morning, I head to the neighborhood of La Timba,
down a warren of streets lined with tin-roofed shanties and piles of
rotting garbage. It's all within sight of the hulking, Soviet-inspired
monuments of Plaza de la Revolución, where Fidel Castro used to speak
for hours on end and Raúl Castro has his offices.
Dayanis Cabrera, 38, calls me into her home, three rooms built from
cracked cinder blocks and rotting planks. The intense morning sun
pierces the darkness through gaps in the corrugated-metal roof. Her
elderly father, who's suffering from cancer, lies on a bare mattress in
the small bedroom to the left. Cabrera leafs through her little, 22-page
food-rationing booklet, which lists the staples every Cuban can get for
next to nothing at government food depots.
"No one can live off this," she says, sitting in her kitchen, where a
tattered curtain serves as a door. Her family's rations: a quarter-kilo
of chicken, 10 eggs, one pack of spaghetti, a half-kilo of black beans,
and a quarter-liter of cooking oil per person per month. Shortages of
food are rare, but the price of most things is simply prohibitive. "I'm
just hopeful that all this change will bring a living wage," Cabrera
says, shaking her head.
As we speak, she's loading a metal tray with peanuts she's roasted over
her gas stove. She'll take them around her neighborhood and try to sell
them on the street.
Most Cubans have to scrape and hustle to put together a decent living.
Nearly everyone I meet in Havana has a story of moonlighting in odd jobs
or even stealing to make up for dismal pay. One friend's father sells
Cohiba cigars pilfered from the factory where he works. A young engineer
drives tourists around in his mother's Lada to supplement his $19.59
monthly salary as a university professor.
Since Dec. 17, when Castro and President Barack Obama announced plans to
normalize U.S.-Cuban relations, the country has been abuzz with talk of
money to be made. You hear Cubans everywhere speaking giddily about the
imminent end to the U.S. embargo that's hobbled the country for half a
On Aug. 14, I walk to the U.S. embassy on the Malecon seaside promenade
to watch U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry order a Marine honor guard
to run up the U.S. flag, for the first time in 54 years. I am among
thousands of cheering Cubans. Some weep, holding homemade American
flags. Digmari Reyes, a 27-year-old worker at a finance company owned by
GAESA, stands there afterward, smiling broadly. She'd waited three hours
in the searing heat to watch the flag go up. "This has to bring
something good, some prosperity for the vast majority of us who don't
earn enough to live a dignified life," Reyes says, as people surge past
her to take selfies with the embassy's flag in the background.
I meet Alcibiades Hidalgo, an eloquent man of 70 who spent decades
working in Cuban state media and government posts, at an Italian
restaurant in Doral, a prosperous Latino neighborhood in Miami. He's
part of a network of Cuban defectors and self-described exiles engaged
in a cottage industry of sorts, that of forecasting Raúl Castro's next
move. Hidalgo wants to offer his perspective on how Castro plotted the
changes Cuba is now experiencing.
In April 1981, Castro called Hidalgo, then a young diplomat, into his
sprawling office on the fourth floor of the headquarters of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces. He directed Hidalgo to join a handful of
powerful advisers who, among other things, were going to overhaul the
economy. Unlike his impulsive, autocratic brother, Castro was always a
conciliatory, methodical commander who preferred change when it was
gradual, well planned, and, above all, efficient. He ordered his
advisers to scour the world for interesting economic policies that might
be adapted to Cuba. "Raúl always wanted to study economic experiments
and apply them to the economic model," says Hidalgo.
One of the most powerful advisers of them all was general Julio Casas, a
bank accountant–turned–guerrilla commander who fought under Castro's
command during the revolution. In meetings, Castro praised Casas for his
stingy nature, which was applied to controlling costs and improving
efficiency in whatever mission he was given. Castro put Casas to work
building what would become GAESA. Casas's top aide was Rodriguez, who
would sit quietly near Casas in meetings with Castro, talking only when
addressed, Hidalgo recalls.
"Luis Alberto was not very sophisticated."
Casas built GAESA around wringing revenue from the military's properties
and assets. Soldiers planted crops on fallow swaths of bases. Work
brigades built tourist hotels. Military planes were refitted for
domestic passenger flights for GAESA's ad hoc civilian airline,
Aerogaviota. Casas, assisted by Rodriguez, also helped develop a
benchmarking process for state companies called the Business Improvement
System. "Under Raúl, the military had its own, parallel economy,"
Hidalgo recalls.As Casas started new businesses, he put Rodriguez in as
manager. "Luis Alberto was not very sophisticated," says Hidalgo, who
rose to become Castro's chief of staff. (In 2002, Hidalgo fled Cuba at
night in a speedboat, bound for Miami, after being sidelined and then
blacklisted for almost a decade, in one of the regime's political
purges.) "But he was an efficient manager who was cold and calculated in
his pursuit of power."With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
Cuba lost its economic patron, and the country was plunged into a
crushing four-year contraction known as the Special Period. Cubans
endured shortages of food and medicine. Jobs disappeared. The sugar
industry, which had long supplied the Soviets at inflated prices, fell
apart. In 1993, Cuba's gross domestic product shrank 14.9 percent,
according to the World Bank.Fidel Castro responded with schemes to lure
foreign money into Cuba. He legalized the possession of hard currency.
He allowed people to start dozens of kinds of private businesses,
including family restaurants.
Big change came to GAESA as well. Its tourism arm, Grupo de Turismo
Gaviota, cut deals with international chains, most notably Spain's Meliá
Hotels International and Iberostar Hotels & Resorts, to build and run
hotels and resorts in Varadero, a 20-kilometer stretch of white, sandy
beach two hours east of Havana by car.
By the late 1990s, the Castros had found their savior in Hugo Chávez,
the charismatic ex-paratrooper who was elected president of Venezuela on
promises to emulate Cuban-style socialism. He quickly flooded Cuba with
free oil—up to 115,000 barrels a day. Cuba also cut creative and
lucrative deals with other leftist leaders, including Brazil's Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, to send tens of thousands of medical doctors to
work abroad. Under the terms of those deals, many of which are still in
place, the Cuban government kept up to 90 percent of the doctors' wages.
After Chávez died of cancer in March 2013, Venezuela slid into an
economic crisis. The country slashed oil shipments to Cuba—some
estimates say by a third or more. Cuba once again needed cash.
"Raúl Castro has to open Cuba up to the world, to the capitalist,
free-market world. He has no choice," says Emilio Morales, a former
marketing executive at Cimex, a big conglomerate later folded into
GAESA. Morales, too, now lives in Miami, where he runs the Havana
Consulting Group. He has developed an unmatched database of thousands of
new, private businesses in Cuba.
Morales opens his laptop to take me through his analysis of the new
Cuban economy. According to his research, people made 650,000 trips to
Cuba from America last year, taking advantage of Obama's and Castro's
relaxed travel restrictions. "Look at this," he says, pointing to a 2013
survey of travelers to Cuba. "They brought $3.5 billion of goods with
them in their suitcases." And Cuban-Americans sent $3.1 billion to
relatives in Cuba. "It's a huge impact."
Foreign businesspeople are not immune.
So much has changed in Cuba, but so much hasn't. In August alone, the
month the flag was raised over the U.S. embassy, security forces made
913 politically motivated arrests, according to the Cuban Human Rights
Observatory. Castro's government represses dissent, routinely harasses
independent journalists and activists, and restricts access to the
Internet for the vast majority of Cubans, Human Rights Watch
says.Foreign businesspeople are not immune. Sarkis Yacoubian, a
55-year-old Canadian, made his home in Cuba for two decades, building a
company called Tri-Star Caribbean. He sold cars, trucks, and industrial
equipment, mainly to GAESA-owned companies. On July 13, 2011, armed
internal security troops—Cuba's secret police—swarmed Yacoubian's
office. He was held for more than two years as police interrogators
leveled allegations of tax evasion, corruption, and, ultimately,
espionage.Investigators seemed to believe, Yacoubian says, that the BMWs
a GAESA executive expressed interest in buying contained technology that
would allow Cuba's enemies to track Raúl Castro. Yacoubian denied all
the allegations; he says he wasn't given the time or resources to
prepare a proper defense. Government officials and documents concluded
that Tri-Star and Yacoubian didn't owe any taxes in Cuba, court records
show. Nevertheless, after a two-day trial in May 2013, a Havana court
sentenced Yacoubian to nine years in prison and fined him $7.5 million
on charges of bribery, tax evasion, and causing economic harm to
Cuba.Then, in February 2014, Yacoubian was suddenly released without
explanation and put on a plane to Canada. The Cuban justice ministry
seized Tri-Star Caribbean's assets, valued at $20 million. Most of them
were absorbed by GAESA's Almacenes Universales and other companies
Yacoubian did business with. "They took everything from me," says
Yacoubian, who is now a consultant on Cuban business issues. "I was
completely innocent."
Cuba is a place both frozen in time and moving swiftly toward a future
in which private enterprise will be a bigger part of life. Vast areas of
Havana are little changed from 1959, when Fidel Castro's bearded
guerrilla fighters marched into town. The streetscapes are largely free
of billboards and ads. Vintage American cars are, as promised,
everywhere. As for the fast-arriving future, there are Afro-Cuban jazz
clubs, swank private restaurants, and boutique hotels. More tellingly,
on street corners within the few, closely controlled,
government-sponsored Wi-Fi zones, Cubans by the hundreds sit and stand
all day in the tropical sun, clutching phones, tablets, and laptops,
eager to take advantage of the first chance many have ever been given to
What's amazing about all this is how Raúl Castro has managed to convince
the most die-hard followers of Cuba's socialist revolution to embrace
his capitalist changes. After succeeding his brother as head of state,
Castro placed a series of reform proposals before a powerful body he
leads, the Council of State.
Miguel Barnet, a famous Cuban anthropologist, author, poet, and
translator who sits on the council, says he's no economist but he was
convinced that Cuba had to embrace Castro's vision. "We need to develop,
and these changes will help us do it without sacrificing the
revolution," says Barnet, 75, who in conversation toggles between
Spanish and near-perfect American English, which he polished in New
York, where he spent several months after winning a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1983.
The members of the council debated and shaped Castro's proposals
endlessly. In April 2011, the Cuban Communist Party's Sixth Congress
approved 313 Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the Party and the
In early 2013, Marino Murillo, who's known as Castro's economic reform
czar, called 20 of Cuba's top economic minds to his office on Plaza de
la Revolución. They were leaders of university departments, think tanks,
and foundations, including Pérez. Murillo, a general known for his
straight talk and blunt style, didn't mince words. He told them to use
their knowledge to turn the guidelines into policies that would reshape
the Cuban economy.
Murillo ordered one group, which included Pérez, to come up with
proposals to overhaul Cuba's 1995 foreign-investment law. They had to
sum it up in fewer than 32 pages, following a strict PowerPoint-like
format used in the Cuban military. Pérez and six other economists
studied foreign-investment laws from around the developing world. Six
months later, they gave their pitch to a panel of military commanders,
government officials, and economists. The changes they proposed included
allowing foreign companies to own 100 percent of their ventures in Cuba,
up from 49 percent, and giving them an eight-year respite from paying
taxes. "They asked a lot of hard questions. There was a lot of
reflection, trying to square it with their ideology," Pérez says. The
National Assembly of People's Power, Cuba's legislative arm, approved
the new law in March 2014. "In the end, they accepted 80 percent of what
we proposed," Pérez says.
By then, Castro had already moved Cuba's most profitable state companies
under GAESA and Luis Alberto Rodriguez. The biggest addition to GAESA
was Cimex, which had been run for three decades by military commanders
chosen by Fidel Castro. Adding the Cimex companies more than doubled the
size of GAESA. More recently, Rodriguez was given the green light to
take over Habaguanex, the state company that owns the best commercial
real estate in Old Havana, including 37 restaurants and 21 hotels.
Rodriguez rarely deals with clients, apparently preferring to delegate
to the managers who run GAESA's collection of companies. Early one
morning, Mohamed Fazwi, who runs operations in Cuba for Blue Diamond
Resorts, a Barbados-based hotel chain, meets me for coffee at Memories
Miramar Havana, set amid a cluster of grand art deco and neoclassical
mansions. Fazwi has been busy since 2011, when Blue Diamond won its
first hotel contract in Cuba.
The company now manages 14 hotels across Cuba, with 8,600-plus rooms,
second to the Meliá group. Many of Blue Diamond's contracts are with
GAESA's Hoteles Gaviota, the biggest state lodging company. "The
executives we deal with are very, very knowledgeable and active. They
know what they want and are really good negotiators," says Fazwi, 43, a
man of Spanish-Palestinian descent who moved to Cuba in 2008. "They are
Rodriguez seemed to be more hands-on in Mariel, where he was entrusted
with building the $1 billion megaport and surrounding free-trade zone.
As the vast ship terminal rose atop an abandoned U.S. air base by the
old Mariel port, where Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 people to flee to
the U.S. in 1980, Rodriguez regularly assembled his engineers for
progress reports. Rodriguez liked to listen more than talk, according to
people who dealt with him in these meetings. But when he spoke,
Rodriguez was concise, specific, and crystal clear. The government saw
the port and the surrounding special development zone as a gateway for a
new economy for Cuba, Rodriguez explained. It would anchor a wave of
international trade, factories, and economic growth.
On Jan. 27, 2014, the port was ready, and dignitaries took their seats
under a brilliant sun for the formal opening. On the stage was Castro,
Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and Brazilian President Dilma
Rousseff. The port, a collection of more than a dozen big cranes, a
700-meter-long pier designed to handle the world's biggest container
ships, a highway, and a rail line to Havana, had been built by Brazil's
mightiest construction company, Odebrecht SA. It was financed at
subsidized rates by Brazil's state development bank in a deal negotiated
directly between Castro and Lula, the former Brazilian president.
Rousseff, smiling, walked up to the podium and started her speech with
the customary naming of dignitaries in the crowd. She thanked Castro and
unnamed Cuban ministers, foreign executives, and leaders. And just
before she leaned into her short address, she thanked one more person by
name: GAESA Chairman Luis Alberto Rodriguez.
This story appears in the November 2015 issue of Bloomberg Markets. With
assistance from Blake Schmidt and Javiera Quiroga.
Source: Want to Invest in Cuba? Meet Your Partner, Castro's Son-In-Law -
Bloomberg Business -
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JPNA is published by the Midwest Public Affairs Conference (MPAC). MPAC is a professional organization that promotes research, collaboration, and socialization between academics, students, policymakers, and practitioners. MPAC is an American Society for Public Administration (ASPA)-affiliated event that serves the Midwest and Great Plains in a manner similar to the organization's other regional affiliates, the Northeast Conference on Public Administration (NECoPA) and the Southeastern Conference of Public Administration (SECoPA).


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What are your thoughts on the Toronto Blessing?
The apostle Paul was very clear in pointing out that "God is not a God of confusion" (1 Cor. 14:33). Where pandemonium rules, we can be certain God is not the author of it.
"You're limiting God," many advocates of the Toronto movement will say.
No, God can do whatever he wills. But He will not deny Himself. He will not mystically reveal Himself to us as someone different from the holy God the Scriptures reveal. Since the Bible tells us He is not the author of confusion--and specifically that He does not approve of disorder in public worship services (this is the whole point of 1 Corinthians 14)—we can know with absolute certainty that He is not the power behind a movement whose main features are hysteria, tumult, and frenzy.
More important, the Scriptures reveal Him as the Spirit of truth (John 14:17), who bears witness not of Himself but of Christ (15:26), who speaks not on His own initiative, but guides us into truth (16:13), and sanctifies us in the truth. Where is this sanctifying truth found? Not through mystical means. God's Word is the truth through which we are sanctified (17:17). This means that one of the Holy Spirit's primary ministries is to convey the truth of Scripture to our understanding. Nothing in Scripture indicates that He works by stirring up our emotions while bypassing our minds.
According to 1 Corinthians 14, this is precisely why Paul valued prophecy more than tongues: "For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men, but to God; for no one understands ... But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation" (vv. 2-3, emphasis added). "If I come to you speaking in tongues, what shall I profit you, unless I speak to you either by way of revelation or of knowledge or of prophecy or of teaching?" (v. 6). The point is to communicate truth. Ministry that bypasses the understanding is pointless: "If the bugle produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare himself for battle?" (v. 8). All the gifts are meant to edify, which is an expression Paul uses to speak of ministering to the mind (v. 3). That is why Paul insisted that tongues be interpreted. "So also you, since you are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek to abound for the edification of the church" (v. 12, emphasis added).
When the laughing revival has run its course, what will be next? How can a movement stoked by the heat of raw passion rekindle the flames when people's emotions finally grow cold?
Those who really know Christ and love Him must come back to the truth of His Word.
Adapted from John MacArthur, Reckless Faith (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1995).
For more information, consider the following resources:


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Religion in Hip-Hop: Reconciling Rap and Religion
The art form of hip-hop music and Christianity are often viewed by scholars and skeptics as polar opposites. Rappers employ the art of rhyme to communicate specific and unspecific messages to their audience that sometimes include Christian terminology. Scholars often hear Christian terms used by rappers and identify that artist with Christianity, which sometimes leads to pastors holding secular artists accountable to the standards of the faith.
However, this analysis is inaccurate, according to Dr. Monica R. Miller, visiting Assistant Professor for Religious Studies at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. Miller recently released a book titled "Religion and Hip-Hop" that examines the relationship of the art form and the faith more closely. Miller challenges her peers to stop studying hip-hop through the lens of Christianity, and to view rappers more as products of their own environment. Miller's ultimate goal is to find a different approach towards the study of the two, and break down the man-made separation between them.
The Christian Post recently interviewed Miller in attempts to tackle some of the tough questions related to the study of religion and hip-hop and the separation between the two.
CP: Why do you think that many rappers use religious or Christian terms in hip-hop music?
Miller: I think that more often than not [rappers use of religious terms in music] is highly unconscious … it is a part of entertainment. Also, [there] are definitely cultural expressions that are of familial inheritance of particular aspects of religion. … They use the language that they are at home with to make certain points about their own human interests.
CP: Could you provide me with an example of this?
Miller: In 2009 … three books [were released] by rappers that all made use of religion in really interesting ways and also figure that KRS-One [released] Gospel of Hip-Hop. Here's this 600-page book called The Gospel of Hip-Hop and what's fascinating to me is [that] it's fashioned after a Bible. Is he selling hip-hop as a religion? Is he selling Christianity? … It almost can be read as him selling Christianity using hip-hop as a way to draw people in. … The book makes use of Christian theological themes and signifiers.
I'm not fully persuaded that [KRS-One] is trying to make a religious statement. What I'm interested in is why do religious uses of religion proliferate [in hip-hop.] And they are usually Christian in nature, but they are not used in traditional ways.
For example, scholars in religious studies who work within the Christian tradition, they'll look at such uses [of religion in hip-hop] and they'll say that Christianity might be the number one religion in hip-hop. But is [that statement valid]?
CP: Do you think that Christianity is the most popular religion within hip-hop?
Miller: I'm not exactly sure. I think that [rappers] make use of Christian terms, ideas and resurrection stories. [You have the creation of Black Jesus] and then [rappers] using him as a kind of human comparative with the ways in which black men struggle in the projects [and rappers talking about] wearing the Jesus Piece [and they also] reinterpret themselves through the life and story of Jesus.
I think the reason why these uses proliferate, especially the Christian uses, is because the story really sells. We don't have to persuade people in the United States [to embrace Christian themes]. Christianity holds an immense amount of political, social and cultural weight in our society. So if you want to sell a particular human idea or an idea about yourself, what better way to do it than to read yourself through the Christian story?
CP: On your website you make a statement saying the question, "Can the church be hip-hop?" is flawed, and that it is rooted in the spirit of market maintenance. Can you elaborate on the meaning of market maintenance and this statement in general?
Miller: Market maintenance is a theme that I developed in "Religion and Hip-Hop." When I developed that concept of market maintenance … what I was trying to do was read the ways that scholars in religious studies and theology in particular have dealt with the cultural data of hip-hop as it relates to religion and theology.
One of the things that I find problematic about the current scholarship that we do have in religion and hip-hop is … [all] analysis is done within a Christian theological perspective. … There's this kind of theological domination on the study of religion in hip-hop, and I don't think the academic study of religion should be confined to theology.
I also think that most of the scholars writing about religion in hip-hop are they themselves personally Christian, and so they read their own Christian experience and their Christian theological understanding into the way that they analyze religion in hip-hop. … It's a growing trend among certain scholars of color who happen to be ministers and also Ph.Ds at the same time. … They raise a question in the work, [which is] "How can the church be hip-hop?"
That brand of engagement [which is] looking at religion in hip-hop from a black church paradigm fashions faith-based institutions hierarchically. It puts faith based institutions over more "deviant" cultural productions like hip-hop. [The church doesn't want to] understand hip-hop. [They want to] increase the market of young people [for them, and] … get more young people in the church.
I call that approach market maintenance. Their primary motivation is not to understand the uses of religion in hip-hop- [they care about] the black church more so than a rigorous academic analysis of religious uses in hip-hop.
When scholar's primary interests are in the spirit of market maintenance … what they do is they sanitize hip-hop, and they clean it up, so they make a separation between the sacred and the profane and that's one of my biggest issues [with their analyses].
I didn't specifically develop [this] idea as a critique against churches necessarily, churches on the ground trying to struggle with a changing religious economy when it comes to young people's participation in religion. Certainly we [also] have the proliferation of hip-hop churches- pastors who used to be rappers … whose churches are by default "hip-hop" in some kind of way.
CP: How do you feel about artists, who create "Christian hip-hop," who are basically communicating their faith through the art form?
Miller: What interests me ... is not necessarily the artist, but [how the public receives them]. I think Time Magazine just [wrote a piece] on Lecrae and the rise of Christian rap music and one of the things that really fascinates people is how Lecrae is able to maintain a very mainstream sound while also still holding on to his faith in a way that perhaps they might argue Tupac did.
I think there are many people who are able to hold on to their faith [in hip-hop]. … With that kind of phenomenon rising in our contemporary society, is there a certain way to properly [keep] one's faith while also being a participator in or an artist of hip-hop culture? I think Tupac does it in just similar brilliant ways that Lecrae does it … [Lecrae's] a little bit more theologically conservative than someone like Tupac. … Tupac did talk about faith a lot, but Tupac was a complex individual.
CP: Do you think that the rappers of the 1980s and 1990s had more of a respect for religion or God than some of today's more popular hip-hop artists?
Miller: Let's take Meek Mill's case, for example.
Meek Mill is a mainstream rapper whose song "Amen" had religious themes that were considered blasphemous and offensive by some critics. A local Philadelphia pastor urged him to apologize for the song and repent for his actions in a live radio interview. Mill refused.
I honestly think that [this was totally uncalled for]. … I do think that there is a connection between the economy and the kind of in your face [delivery by rappers] in rap music that sells. It might seem that it's getting a little bit more disrespectful, but I think that to say that it's becoming more fully disrespectful is to say that also the beginnings of hip-hop were more conscious, more political and now we're kind of moving into this complete fleshly domain of rap music that just completely disregards all domains of human life including religiosity.
I don't think that it's getting worse or better. I think that it's just a reflection of our changing historical moment, where people have a different relationship to and with religion.
For more information on Dr. Monica R. Miller click here.
To purchase "Religion and Hip-Hop," click here.